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Essays

Freedom Shaped by Love

Freedom shaped by love is not a passive sentimental response to the world’s violence. It is the key to seeing clearly and moving beyond it. It disarms, dismantles, and disappears.

Nietzsche’s Prophet, Shulman’s Prophecy

I am responding to George Shulman’s letters on Nietzsche and on prophecy. I do so by offering some thoughts on Nietzsche’s prophet, Zarathustra. In addition to considering Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in light of Shulman’s “Political Theology” seminar, I also take illumination from Shulman’s American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (2008).

Contemplative Prayer, Desire, and the Problem of Other People

In its embrace of solitude, contemplative prayer opens up a space of tension around the social and embodied qualities of desire.

Ukraine: Separating Just Defence from Dangerous False Narratives

It should be uncontroversial that the Ukrainians have a right to defend their people and their land. However, some have argued that Pope Francis is spearheading a rejection of the just war tradition, replacing it with a thoroughgoing pacifism that would in principle deny this right to the Ukrainian defenders. As an analysis of the Pope’s position, I think this is mistaken.

Fearlessly Embracing Their God: Jezebel and Elijah

Jezebel embraces her gods just as Elijah does. When the prophets of her gods are mocked and killed in a most disrespectful way, Jezebel is angered. In the face of death, she remains fearless. Her fearlessness combined with her reverence to her gods in a foreign land makes her an example for contemporary women. 

Virtual Summer Workshop Series, starting June 15

Political Theology Network is offering a ‘Varieties of Political Theological Method’ summer workshop series. Every Wednesday from June 15. Contact Mary (mnickel@princeton.edu) or Kathy (kathy.chow@yale.edu) for more details.

To Think is to Resist: Notes Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Freedom

Shulman’s seminar unfolds a creative cosmos for pursuing new knowledges and new forms of life together.

Responding to the Desiring God

Contemplating a radical response to contemporary politics of (sexual) desire

Justice, Self-Respect, and the Ukrainian Decision to Go to War

No doubt there are complex reasons of history and diplomacy behind such qualifications and hesitations. But it is accurate to say that they reflect the increasing Catholic skepticism about the moral justification of war at all. But the Ukrainian decision to fight presents an important challenge to that skepticism.

Feminist Fantasy and Political Theology

How does literature shape the world, and the bodies, social forms, and political acts that constitute it? What particular roles might the category of religion, and specifically religious experiences, play in such shaping?

Is there comfort in the Spirit?

Can the Spirit provide comfort when confronted by such great sin and suffering? I offer a tentative, hesitant yes. A Spirit committed to justice is a Spirit that will lament injustice.

Between old and new gods

For the left to prevail in the war between old and new gods, we need not only prophetic discourse, but forms of mass organization capable of cohering a social bloc. In this work, religion, understood not as prophecy but as missionary work, remains a crucial resource.